City over 4,000 years old discovered… hidden in an oasis

The remains of the city, al-Natah, were hidden for a long time in an oasis in Saudi Arabia: a “green and fertile patch surrounded by desert” called Khaybar.

An ancient wall measuring 14.5 kilometers long has been discovered in a Saudi Arabian oasis, explains a led by French archaeologist Guillaume Charlouxpublished earlier this year in Plos One.

The big city (for the time), which even had 500 inhabitantswas built around 2400 BC, that is, in early Bronze Ageresearchers said, and was mysteriously abandoned a thousand years later.

When al-Natah was built, the cities were flourishing in the Levant regionalong the Mediterranean Sea, from present-day Syria to Jordan, explains , at a time when believed that the northwestern Arabian desert was a barren placewhich contained only pastoral sites and cemeteries.

Until 15 years ago, this belief still reigned, but archaeologists who carried out this study have since changed their opinion: at that time, archaeologists walls dating back to the Bronze Age in the Tayma oasis, north of Khaybar. And that’s how the investigation began.

Researchers discovered foundations “strong enough to easily support at least one or two storey houses“, explained Charloux, quoted by Science Alert, adding that there was much more work to do to understand the site.

The city would have around 2.6 hectares and approximately 50 houses built on a hillequipped with its own wall.

Tombs inside a necropolis contained metal weapons like axes and daggersas well as stones such as agate. These factors, according to the researchers, indicate a relatively advanced society for the time.

The ceramic piecessuggest a relatively egalitarian society“, says the study. They are “very beautiful but very simple ceramics,” said Charloux.

This investigation, explains the archaeologist, can open many paths, namely indicating that the fortified oases may have been in contact with each other in an area still largely populated by nomadic pastoral groups, who may even have started the famous “incense route”.

According to Science Alert, these discoveries reveal a process of “slow urbanism”, dictating a transition between nomadic life and the more sedentary life of villages.